Touchstone
by Cricket Songs
Summary: Six deaths revisited; six lessons in the making. Ziva-centric, as always, but includes pretty much everybody (including several dead somebodies). Some mild Tony/Ziva undertones.
1. Smoke

A/N: This is one I dug up on my old computer and decided to finish. I'm a little rusty, but I'll give it a whirl. It will be several chapters long. Most is already written, though, so don't fret.

Frankly, I'm appalled by the utter shortage of Ziva fics that I discovered when I decided to check back with this fandom. C'mon, guys! She's not dead! (My severity is directed more to the show runners than anybody else).

* * *

Touchstone

* * *

There was a memory, soft and warm, of praying beside her sister at the wall on a sunny Friday evening. They wore their dresses, hands clasped tight against their bellies. Her sister had been quite a bit shorter than she, and so as they leaned their bare foreheads up against the wall in the flurry of prayers that surrounded them, she had cracked one eye open to peer down at Talia – and Talia had peered back, smiling and gleeful and beautifully young. They had prayed in tandem, as they'd been taught.

"_Q__umi tze'i mitokh ha'hafeikhah,_" they sang. "_Rav lakh shevet b'eimeq habakha, v'hu yahamol alayikh hemlah."_

And Ziva would smile and try not to laugh as they pushed themselves from the wall and shuffled backward through the chairs to find their parents. Eli, always proud; her mother, always nervous, knowing that the girls should not have gone, knowing that Eli's authority had granted them access.

But Ziva never minded that.

They smiled when they sang.

* * *

The bomb went off on a Saturday night. That was a strategic move, she knew: with the close of Shabbat, the city's dwellers would be taking to the streets to pick up groceries, run their errands, maybe stop at the movie theater or a nice restaurant. Shop keepers would be rolling back the bars on their doors. Tourists would file out of hostels. The streets would come alive, if only briefly, in a quick and modest display of relief. Shabbat had ended – and that warm Saturday night, everyone had felt especially blessed.

And so they had left the bomb tucked near a gutter on Yafo street. Plenty of foot traffic, there; plenty of fodder.

Through the murk of the smoke and fire, as she arrived to respond to the tragedy, she could see the gleam of the dark plastic bags framing the edges of the street. A haze of ground bricks where the road had buckled up beneath the crowd drifted in the air among a blare of sirens and a throaty, lilting wail. She stepped through the rubble, taking it in, trying vehemently to ignore the smell of charred flesh. The night was warm and the street already felt haunted.

It occurred to her that this was _very_ close to her mother's home – Yafo street, just south of the police station, not far from the market where she and her sister had gone to buy passion fruit smoothies in the summer when she was young. She thought of all the times she had passed through these walkways, had hurried down this street, had known these vendors and these neighbors, and thought herself lucky to have narrowly avoided a catastrophe that could have easily claimed her life.

The thought came around a moment later that this explosion was _close to her home_; and on its heels was the gnawingly dreadful realization that Tali had spent the weekend at their mother's home, and that she did not know where her sister was at that moment.

Later, she learned, her sister had gone to buy a smoothie on Yafo street.

Just south of the police station.

* * *

She left her mother in the care of her Aunt Netty and she tried to step outside of herself to deliver the news to her father and her brother, who had both been traveling abroad when it happened. She struggled to find her composure; left groping in the dark somewhere between her blinding grief and a stoic professionalism. When her father finally answered the phone she blurted, "Abba," and then realized with a flash of horror that she felt so very young. That her father made her small again.

She cleared her throat and quickly corrected herself: "Eli."

But he knew, of course he knew, and she was struggling to put it into words, and before she could finish delivering this terrible news, he was saying to her, weary, "I know, Ziva. I am on my way."

By happenstance, they were left alone together at the cemetery.

Blessings given, voices choked, eyes red, the funeral was over and nearly everyone had gone. She caught sight of her brother standing quietly on the fringes of the lawn, where he had been through it all, hanging back and watching with dark, heavy eyes. He regarded their father from afar. As she watched, he scrutinized the scene without batting an eye, his gaze calculating and oddly cool. Before she could stop to consider what he might be thinking, he was gone. He slinked back into the street like a snake.

Curious, she turned to look up at her father. She examined his face, that expression. She felt very much like she knew her father very well and doubted that he could hide his emotions from her. He had a skill for remaining detached in his professional world of war, but she'd been trained to read faces, too, and he was her father and she _knew _him and she thought that it would be enough to detect the grief he was feeling.

But as she looked, there was nothing. No tell. His eyes were dark, half-lidded. A beam of light from the street corner shone on the surface of his glasses and broke across their golden frame. He looked old to her, older than he'd ever seemed before. But she could see nothing beyond it. As if his heart had been plastered up behind a wall somewhere.

She pulled her shoulders in and straightened her back.

"What happens next?" She asked, already aware of what the answer would be, but wanting the simple reassurance of her father's voice and not knowing any other way to ask for it.

"There are officers out investigating this attack." He paused. When she said nothing, straining for more, he continued. "As we speak, they are examining the damage and sifting through the claims that have been made by local organizations. It seems every time a fire starts or a building collapses, there are a dozen men stepping up to take credit."

She felt her lip twitching upward.

"This was not a simple fire," she said. "It was deliberate."

"Yes. I know."

"Do you have a lead on who might be responsible?"

There was a pause. She held her hands together against her abdomen and looked out at the graves, realizing just how badly she wanted to find vengeance and thinking how strange it was that it had taken so long for her to realize it. When her father said nothing, she turned to peer up at him.

He swallowed thickly.

"This is not something for you to worry about, Ziva. We can discuss this tomorrow. Take this time to grieve. To collect yourself."

Anger and resentment flared suddenly within her, and she found herself balking. She crossed her arms tightly across her chest.

"I do not _need _to grieve, I _am _collected, and I want to know who is responsible for this."

"Not now."

"Then _when_? When it is too late for us to fight back? I am _sick_ of waiting for others to solve these problems. She was _my _sister."

"And _my _daughter."

She wanted to cry, but that would come later. She knew she couldn't cry here in front of _him, _and her best coping method was to wound, to lash out, to _hurt_, and before she could think to hold herself back, she was hissing, "How can you say this? If you loved her, you would want someone to pay, you wouldn't be able to sleep or eat or speak, you would be _out there _looking for the people who killed her!"

He looked at her sharply and she bit her tongue so suddenly that it flared in pain and then promptly went numb; but the action was cathartic, her anger and outrage and disbelief and that overwhelming sense of _loss _leaving her so restless that she needed to lash, needed to bite.

She was wise enough to stop talking.

Her tongue began to ache.

After a moment, he looked away and began speaking.

"There is a great deal of dying here, Ziva. This is not the first family to be broken by war; not the first in Israel, not even the first on our street."

She hesitated. "And that justifies it?"

"No." He met her eyes. "That _humbles_ it."

She swallowed thickly and turned to look across the lawn, the headstones studding the hills, glowing dimly in the low light of dusk. And Talia – somewhere far below.

She shook her head once, violently.

"I'm sorry. I don't care, right now, that people here are dying and people are suffering. I've just buried my sister. She is dead now, and there is no good reason for her to be gone, and _I don't care _about anyone else in this cemetery or anyone else out there on the street. This should not have happened. There is no justification."

He was quiet for a moment; when he spoke, it seemed almost as if he were speaking to himself.

"You will understand this someday, Ziva. The strongest steel is forged of the hottest fires…you will learn from this. Be forged by it. You will understand it, someday."

And she thought that her father, try as he might, would never understand that this atrocity, this _wrongness_, could not be justified and would not be undone. Would not be reduced to some metaphor; would not be humbled.

She watched him catalog the patterns of his grief, all the broken things. She was sharp enough to know that this would not be the end of it. And the man who was struggling so valiantly to wield a human heart beneath a world of pain was being pushed beyond his means to the quietude of the realist, the humility of the fallen; all the faults she could not yet understand.

* * *

Her mother was another matter altogether. When Talia died, her mother nearly fell to pieces, and in retrospect she might've guessed that it was just a turn of fate that her mother, too, would be dead within a couple of years, long after she'd lost the will to live.

Like a piece of glass, like crystal fractured, her mother nearly fell to pieces; she did not break, but ceased to shine, the surface of her marred with the spiderweb of cracks that grief had given her. She lived with the scars of Talia's death bared clear for all to see. In the first week, Eli went to her, but even that fell apart, the way things always do. And it fell to Ziva to care for her mother, to hold her as she wept, to feed her and to sit with her those long, quiet nights, when her mother would lay teary-eyed on the covers of her bed, staring at the darkness of the ceiling, hands wrung dry on a dark scarf.

Ziva watched as the throes of grief overcame her mother. Ziva watched, and, fearing what that fire would do to her, receded, stepped away, kindled anger but not grief. She hated that she felt so much like her father – hated to be hardened – but the things that grief had done to her mother made her fear the horrors that the world could inflict on a soft heart.

And so, bit by bit, she allowed her heart to harden.

* * *

A/N: Here's one that's actually kinda true - reviews can lower your blood pressure and prompt the release of endorphins...for me, of course, but maybe also for you. So if you need a pick-me-up (and I could certainly use one, or two, or three) then drop a review and make the world a happier place.

More chapters are on the way!


	2. Snakes

A/N: Another chapter! Thanks for the reviews, favorites, and follows. Y'all are pretty great.

* * *

When she was seven years old, Ziva and Ari discovered a series of steps in the old city of Akko that gave them access to the rooftops. Later, Ari would swear that the discovery was his alone – that she had wanted to linger in the streets chasing alleycats, and he'd found the steps, cobbled and worn, on his own. Ari would swear that she'd been a fickle girl. Unobservant. Ari would lie – about this and other memories.

They had ascended the steps on hands and knees and climbed up onto a concrete roof where the sun was unfiltered and the trash of irreverent tourists lay in rotting heaps. Ari had gone to pick through it, pocketing chicken bones and broken watches.

Ziva had gone immediately to the edge of the roof. She'd stood with her toes curled over the edge, arms thrust out. She'd gone to the edge just to scare her brother into thinking she might jump. He had sworn at her, and then laughed and done the same.

And they had run and played and lounged on the rooftops, burning their toes, earning scornful looks from old mothers far below. They traced the routes of Templars and pretended they were soldiers. On the corrugated lip of a bakery, they had found two Domari boys smoking cigarettes. They made friends, and played until the sun went down and the boys had to climb back to the street to bend their knees and pray.

Ziva and Ari remained, watching as the light disappeared into the west.

"I'm going to be a doctor," Ari told her when the night had grown so thick that she couldn't see his face anymore. "I want to leave this place."

Ziva bit her lip; wrung her hands.

"I'm going to be a ballerina," she had said.

Both of them had lied.

* * *

Their father had never known which of his elder children would make the better soldier; he had banked on both of them, and sometimes neither, but usually put his faith in one above the other and watched as they fought for his favor. He seemed to enjoy the sport of it. He seemed to enjoy their struggle, and maybe even convinced himself that it would turn them _both _into soldiers worthy of merit.

Halfway into her training with Mossad, Ziva's father had taken her aside with a special request: an important mission with the Americans in the Soviet Bloc, he had told her. Mossad was being asked to provide an officer, and she would be an excellent candidate.

She may have been pleased, may have been flattered, may have interpreted his candor as an affirmation of her skills – but she'd known her father far too well, even then, to pretend that this wasn't just another part of just another game.

And so when she'd gone to meet with the American liaison in a dim-lit office in Tel Aviv, she had not been surprised to find Ari there waiting there for her. Smiling.

Because her father had done it again: he had sent them both to fight for it.

* * *

Without preamble, Ari had made his case known to the American.

"Ziva is fickle," he argued, lacking tact and professionalism on a dangerous level. "She cares too much."

"I care for my country," she'd said, and turned to the liaison with a tight smile. "Where I come from, this is called _loyalty_."

He narrowed his eyes. "In America we call it patriotism, and it's a word that's rapidly losing integrity. We can't have an officer blinded by dutiful ideology groping around in the U.S.S.R. like a lost dog looking for a master. Your _loyalty _to anything other than your mission and your ally will make you weak." The American had waved as if to dismiss her entirely. "We'll take the man."

And that was that. She'd felt her blood boiling.

"He has other obligations," she blurted, almost scoffing.

Ari glanced at her coolly from the corner of his dark, sleepy eyes.

"_Bevakashah, _Ziva. You are making yourself look _needy_."

"Jesus," the diplomat sighed. He scrubbed his palm against his face. "Does Mossad train all of its officers to act like petulant children? Enough bickering. This is decided. Officer David, I'm sorry, but you can go home – Haswari, pack your things. Be sure to bring some turtlenecks. Chechnya is cold this time of year."

"Chechnya is always cold," Ari grinned, and Ziva resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

They had tried to regain their professionalism; sent the liaison off with a handshake, and then retreated back into the hall, where again they became children. Siblings fighting for favor.

"That was almost sad," Ari said to her.

"_Atah nakhash ganev,_" she spat."And that was _pathetic_."

"You are such a gracious loser. You would not like the Caucasus, anyway. They are too cold for you."

"You have never_ been _to the Caucasus!"

"I've been to Scotland," he said, and deadpanned. "It was cold."

She glanced at him, furrowing her brow and trying, suddenly, not to be amused.

"You know you haven't won yet," she said. "They are going to pick me."

He threw a glance over his shoulder.

"Have you not heard, Ziva? They already picked me."

* * *

And then, something strange: an explosion in the West Bank. Casualties. Something tragic. Ari had been forced to retreat very suddenly, and her father had called with the grave news that Ari's mother was dead – and then, with a low and deliberate voice, he had told Ziva that she should pack her things.

Because she would be taking Ari's place on his mission to Chechnya.

* * *

Ari was never the same. Their scramble for favor seemed to swiftly shrivel up; and she would tell herself that they were simply getting older, growing up, that it didn't matter anymore. That her father loved them both. That he saw their merit; knew that his children had become exceptional soldiers.

One day, in the middle of a mission, her father had called her into his office for a private discussion. Ari was in trouble, he'd told her. Something had happened in America.

He asked her, as a control officer, to resolve the situation; and, as a sister, to fetch her wayward brother. Bring him home.

But she had seen that conflict swimming in her father's eyes, and knew, even then, with a tremendous weight in her belly – that her brother was already gone.

* * *

A jolt, a puff of smoke, and it was over. She had never before felt the heat of the kickback on her hand; had never realized how heavy the gun actually felt, or how the smell caught in her lungs and made her hiccup.

She paid great attention to the gun. Tried to ignore the body in a quickly expanding pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs.

In a daze, she'd gone to him.

And she thought of that night on the roof in Akko, wishing that neither one of them had ever touched this world; wishing that he'd been a doctor, that she'd been a ballerina.

She prayed over the body of her brother.

* * *

"I am coming home, Abba."

There was a long pause on the other end. She hoped that he was glad, hoped in a way that almost made her sick that he believed that Ari would be coming home with her, absolved and alive. He couldn't be surprised by a death he had all but ordered, but she hoped that her father had loved his son, because that meant _something, _and she just hoped he'd be surprised. She hoped, and for a moment, it made her sick.

"Ari?" he asked.

She turned her eyes to the open hangar. The night was closing in around her; wet and cool with rain.

"Ari is dead," she fumbled over her tongue for a moment and then added a lilting "Abba" to the end of her sentence, hating the way it inflected, hating how small she felt. How her father and death could make her small.

There was a pause. She imagined him sinking nimbly down into his seat. Staring at a wall. Imagined grief on his face and realized with a soft jolt that they'd been here once before, she'd twice had the chance to tell her father that one of his children was dead and neither time had she seen it on his face; for he had always been a world away.

"How?" he asked.

She swallowed hard and almost bit her tongue. Gibbs' voice echoed in her mind.

_Lie_, she thought, and took comfort in the cold of the night.

"He tried to kill Agent Gibbs. He killed Agent Todd, Abba, he assassinated her and then tried to do the same to Gibbs," and then she leapt over the lie without missing a beat, "and he killed him in self-defense."

She tried to convince herself that the pause which followed was shorter than it felt. When her father spoke again, if he knew that she was lying, he did not let it show in his voice.

"Come home, Ziva. Bury your brother."

_Lo emet v'lo shalom. _And Ari was dead.

* * *

A/N: Building up to Jenny in the next chapter (Chechnya! Vodka! Gunfights!)

Anyway - psychologists have suspected for quite some time that there is a correlation between awesome summer vacations and plentiful reviews. Vacationers who fail to leave reviews for the stories they read report, on a whole, that their summer vacations pretty much sucked.

It's true. Even if it wasn't...would you want to take that risk?


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